Dr. Wendy Nielsen joins Mindworks in Conversation to explore why Frankenstein still shapes how we think about technology, medicine, and humanity.
Dr. Wendy Nielsen joins Mindworks in Conversation to explore why Frankenstein still shapes how we think about technology, medicine, and humanity. A professor of English at Montclair State University, Dr. Nielsen teaches European Romanticism, science fiction, Enlightenment literature, and medical humanities. She is the author of Women Warriors in Romantic Drama and Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650–1890, which examines how figures such as Frankenstein’s creature, automata, and androids have shaped cultural ideas about artificial life, technology, and what it means to be human. Her scholarship spans Rousseau, Goethe, Romantic-era automata, and Frankenstein, and her current work focuses on American illness narratives and experiences of chronic disease.
In our conversation, we explore why Frankenstein refuses to die, how it speaks to grief, responsibility, and the allure of conquering death, and what it has to say about our current moment of AI, bioengineering, and transhumanist dreams.
Critical Themes and Questions
Outsiders, Otherness, and the Ethics of Care - A central motif Wendy highlights is Frankenstein’s enduring interrogation of how societies treat outsiders—those rendered marginal, voiceless, or monstrous. The creature becomes a powerful lens for examining rejection, dehumanization, isolation, and the longing to be seen and heard, resonating strongly with narrative-medicine commitments to listening, witnessing, and ethical care.
Grief, Loss, and the Desire to Overcome Death - Grief drives the novel at every level: Victor’s grief for his mother, Shelley’s grief for her children, and the creature’s grief for a life without love. Wendy traces how both Shelley’s biography and modern adaptations (including del Toro’s work) deepen this theme, revealing the human urge to undo loss—to resurrect the dead or create life as a response to unbearable absence.
Hubris, Singular Genius, and the Ethics of Creation - Victor emerges as an emblem of unchecked, isolated genius—the Romantic fantasy of creation without responsibility. Wendy critiques this model through discussions of playing God, the moral obligations of creators, and contemporary parallels in AI, CRISPR, and transhumanism. Frankenstein is framed as a cautionary tale about innovation severed from care and accountability.
Multivocal Storytelling and Unreliable Narration - The conversation explores Shelley’s layered narrative structure (Walton → Victor → creature → Victor → Walton), which produces ambiguity, subjectivity, and ethical uncertainty. Questions of trust, narrative authority, and shifting sympathy emerge, aligning closely with narrative-medicine concerns about perspective, bias, and who is allowed to speak.
Gender, Race, Colonialism, and Body Politics - Wendy situates Frankenstein within broader cultural critiques, drawing on scholarship that examines gender erasure and the marginalization of women, racialized readings of the creature, Gothic anxieties about miscegenation, colonial travel narratives and slavery, and queer interpretations of Victor–creature dependency. The novel becomes not just gothic horror, but a site of social and political reckoning.
Adaptation, Cultural Afterlives, and the Plasticity of the Myth - Across the interview, Frankenstein’s afterlives—in literature, film, horror, art, and AI discourse—reveal its remarkable adaptability. From Whale to del Toro to cult reinterpretations, each era reshapes the story to reflect its own anxieties. The myth endures because it remains a flexible framework for thinking through science, identity, grief, and the ethics of creation.
